Miner's Luck

this was in response to a prompt to incorporate stone, mystery, and gold leaf into a short story.

*

The tram mates up with the airlock to our hovel, and Jimmy cycles through. He hands me a mystery box.

“What? This had better be worth a quarter of your salary, Jimmy,“ I scowled. To his credit, Jimmy has the decency to look down at the worn-out boots he uses to work the mines, like he knows it’s not going to pay off. The Company offers these boxes as a form of gambling­­—a sucker’s bet, more often than not. One of those many ways they keep us all dependent. A quarter of his salary is what the Company charges us each week to pay the indenture that we inherited from our parents. The indenture that took them from us, and will probably take us too. I know, in my heart though, that Mom and Dad are still looking out for us.

“We need a break, Sis” he says, and I can hear the longing in his voice. He works real hard. And it’s true. We do need a break. We need new gear. Jimmy hasn’t had a decent meal in a week because we had to pay them back for the injury to his hand. It’s not like we can afford to throw away what little household money we collect, is it?

Behind his back, I see two of Jimmy’s fingers twisting together, in supplication to Barbara, patron saint of miners. Good idea. I send up a little prayer of my own.

I can’t be mad at him. He’s all I have left. “It’s all right,” I tell him. Jimmy’s hunched shoulders unwind a bit, and he looks up.

I lift the lid of the box. Jimmy leans over and peers inside with me. It isn’t the mining dust we expect. It’s a stone.

With trembling fingers, I lift it out of the box and start to turn it over.

“Don’t drop it, Sis!” Jimmy exclaims.

Like me, he’s starting to believe. There must be a hundred thousand mystery boxes in the vault in back of the Company store. Maybe one in a thousand has a stone. The stones come in different color markings; it’s worth at least a week’s salary. I can feel my chest loosen. His gamble has paid off.

I rotate the bottom of the stone into the light of the reading lamp over our kitchen table. Golden flashes catch our eyes. And our breath.

“it’s… the gold?” Tears are running freely down Jimmy’s face, mixing with the dust, forming dark little runnels. Mine too.

“It’s the gold, Sis!”

I can’t believe it either. There’s only one stone with gold leaf. It’s enough to buy out our indenture altogether and pay for passage off of this rock and back to Earth. I grab Jimmy in a hug so fierce he probably can’t breathe.

We did it, Mom. We did it.